


all the sinners, saints

by cicak



Series: Coronavirus Decameron (WIP Amnesty 2020) [2]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Ethics, Eugenics Wars (Star Trek), Federation Politics, Feminism, Gen, Genetics, Motherhood, WIP amnesty 2020, augment politics, jules bashir - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:42:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23191087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: It started simply enough, when Jules was held back for the second time.
Series: Coronavirus Decameron (WIP Amnesty 2020) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1666177
Comments: 10
Kudos: 42





	all the sinners, saints

It started simply enough, when Jules was held back for the second time.

“It’s not his fault”, the teacher said. “He tries. The amount he tries is part of the problem – he knows something’s not right. The other kids fail, but they get it eventually. He gets frustrated, then angry, then starts hitting himself.”

“He’s so lovely”, the teacher says, as Jules wraps himself in Amsha’s long skirts until he gets lost and struggles, almost pulling her down. “The other kids love him. We love having him. His frustrations are the issue. I’d recommend medication, but he isn’t getting angry for no reason. His attention isn’t the problem. Teaching just...isn’t getting through.”

It’s a beautiful early summer day. Jules is six, her pride and joy, and her heart hurts when she looks at him. He’s small and cute, he knows all the kids at school. They’ve moved him around the early years teachers, all have said the same. Nice kid, he just needs help.

Amsha puts him on her hip to unlock the skimmer and puts him in the child seat, buckles him in, and tucks his bear in his arms.

Private healthcare is a bit of an oxymoron on Earth, but some doctors are more equal than others. One of the yummier mummies at school gives her a name and comm address of a Doctor in the city, one who did wonders for her child. “I’m sure it’s fine, it was with Kay, but he’s a realist. He’ll tell you what the others won’t.”

The new doctor is indeed, very nice, very thorough, and very generous with his time. He runs tests, which don’t cost a lot of money, so to speak, but the doctor makes a big deal out of the forms that Amsha needs to sign. The doctor explains to her up front exactly what he’s submitting to the authorities, the justification he is writing on the form so that she is aware, can back him up. The evidence that isn’t false, but isn’t exactly true either, that allows him to open up another tab on the diagnostic software Amsha’s seen a dozen times, and select sequencing studies and advanced diagnostics that are in the grey areas of the law.

She resigns herself that at least it’s the modern world, and taking blood is painless. Not that it really matters, Jules loves going to the doctor, loves asking questions, loves the fuss and the excitement. The doctor scans him, gives him a lollipop made of real cane sugar, which is how Amsha knows that this is serious, and sends him out of the room with the nurse to play.

“The fact of the matter is that he’s borderline. He isn’t disabled enough to be eligible for neuro-rehabilitation, which we do, however much we couch it in other language, we do resequence children who have extremely low quality of life. If I’m being honest, I’ve looked the other way enough times to think that the law is too strict, and we let some kids suffer more than I personally think we should.” He sighs, takes his old fashioned glasses off, and rubs his eyes. “That said, legally, Jules’ brain looks normal, there’s nothing to fix. Yes, in another world we could make some changes, but there’s just no way to do it on Earth, or on any Federation world. There’s nothing to fix, Mrs Bashir. Not with his brain. Now, in the sequencing we did we did identify some issues with his stomach, it looks like his stature is possibly because he isn’t absorbing everything he’s eating, but that’s an easy fix. He’s probably already on a vitamin hypo, hm? I’ll give you some protein ones, some aminos, we have some nutrition gummies that the kids love that were developed for famine recovery. Maybe that’ll be enough, and in a year he’ll be making progress.”

Amsha is glad that the nurse took Jules out; because she can’t help but cry, and he gets so agitated when she cries. He’s such a good boy.

The doctor looked to be taking her tears about as well as Jules would, and pressed on.

“I have to say though, the reality is that your son is on the border of normal. A little worse, then maybe we’d be able to do something, but he’s just, not bad enough. You might want to look into sending him to a school for special needs, or even pulling him out of formal schooling altogether, if it’s making him worse.”

He hands her a tissue, and that’s the end of the matter. Amsha takes Jules home, puts him down for a nap, and sits by him, stroking his hair for hours as she thinks.

* * *

Amsha Bashir, nee Subatoi, was not a stupid woman. When Jules first started having problems, she stopped working to try and solve them. She took him to specialists, home schooled him, found a special school and bullied them into taking him, all of which weren’t good enough.

Amsha was a historian by training. She had worked in publishing for a small historical book house before Jules started falling behind. She liked Earth history from the pre-warp period, specifically social history, the stories of the normal people who lived in that time. It had always fascinated her. She liked the parallels with her life today. She reread books from four, five hundred years ago about children who had all the echoes of Jules, the difficulty concentrating, understanding, consoled herself with stories about their failures and successes, loves and triumphs, cried over their scapegoating and tragic deaths at the hand of bullies and cruel writers. 

That day, during Jules’ nap, as the sun set, long golden light streaming in through the window of his room, she didn’t pick up one of those books, and didn't look into the past for the solution to her current problems. The commnet was full of forums, both public and private, for parents of autistic children, and she usually stuck to a few, disliking the labels, special, difficult, neurodivergent, rainbow, alien. She always hated the way the other mothers talk so callously about their children. 

Frustrated, let down, and feeling vulnerable, she went back to those forums and threads she’d not looked at for three years, and it was that day that set the course of the rest of her life, the thing she would spend the rest of her days going over, that would lead to the destruction of the relationship with her son. It was there that she first read mention of Adigion Prime. It was just an aside, one mother mentioning it almost as a throwaway punchline, like some joke they were all in on. The next time Amsha went back to the thread, it was gone and the user was banned, but Amsha, old fashioned and prone to keepsakes, had her Jules-book, a real paper notebook and a pen with ink she used because it was the same shade of green as his eyes, and there in among the daily gains and losses, she had made a note of it in a margin. Over time, she rubbed her thumb over it until the word smudged and blurred. When she burned everything of Jules’, she was tempted to tear out that page, keep it as a memory of the choice she made, how she could go from normal woman to this. 

Amsha was not an angry woman. She was the stable one of the family, her husband and son prone to tantrums, but she wasn’t like them. She thought of herself as a ballast. That night, as Richard snored softly beside her and her wristband thudded Jules’ heartbeat against her own pulse, she felt a rare wave of sheer fury. She was angry. Angry because of what she had read, what she had found when she had searched Adigion Prime. All these earth doctors, all those women on the right kind of message board, they made her feel like she was a bad mother for wanting her son to be normal, for her life to be normal. She didn’t want to spend her entire life reliant on her feckless, risk-taking husband, looking after a boy who would never mentally grow up. She thought they had moved past this idea of motherhood being nothing but sacrifice, some synonym for martyr. Sympathy for women whose sons were a step worse on the scale, but none for her, she was nothing but a bigot, an evil woman who didn’t understand the full spectrum of the human rainbow. That she and Jules would be cursed to walk along the border of normal. Well, Amsha had grown up on a border world, she knew how hard it was. Her parents had moved back to Earth when it became too much for their children. Smug doctors. Smug parents. Judgement. A son she loves so fiercely but can’t help, who slides further from her each day. 

She finds a new set of forums and groups, discards all the bullshit. It takes some time to get access to them, but once she gets in, there’s so much information she’s giddy. There are guides on how, precisely, to advocate for your child, what to say, how to say it, and what to do when it doesn’t work. How you can continue to advocate for him when the world turns against you, how to hide it, how to get justice. 

She buys a second hand PADD at the Saturday market in the city. Richard had taken Jules to football, and usually she’d go and watch them kick a ball about on the common, heart breaking each time remembering where it had started; toddler footie, and her little boy unable to kick a ball. That first bucket from the well of hope that it was just his eyesight, but then the well drained a little more as every hypothesis debunked, until she’s in this place, trading credit chips for gift cards for stolen goods. 

In a cafe she buys a coffee and signs into their public network and follows the instructions she transcribed by hand in order to access the site that allows the jailbreaking program to run, and two strong cups of coffee later, the PADD beeps and freeboots onto another commnet. A few clicks, another page of notes, and it’s all too easy to find a clinic, and then another, and another, her hand sore by the end with how fast she had been writing.

Once she’d given herself permission, it was like being at the controls of a new skimmer. She researched every single clinic. She weighed up the methods. She looked at the packages offered.

For weeks, she does nothing but read. Then, she sends some messages from an anonymous, self-deleting account. It takes very little time for the clinics to reply with quotes. It’s expensive, which she’d known, but that level of expense was just unfathomable. Where they’d even get that many credits, or gift cards, let alone gold-pressed latinum? She hadn’t even heard of it, had needed to look it up.

She makes a plan, a spreadsheet. She always looked after the family finances, after the disaster when Jules was a baby and her parents had needed to bail them out. Richard was doing well at work, and if he could hold it together, maybe if he could get a transfer so she could move closer to her mother, maybe she could take Jules for a few afternoons to let Amsha pick up some work herself, maybe, in a year, if the gummies didn’t work, they could do it. 

“I think I found a way to help Jules”, she says one night, in the soft, sleepy time after she and Richard had made love, curled into each other. “But it’s dangerous. Not to him, but to us.”

“Really?” Richard says. “They can help him?”

“Yes.” she says. “He could be normal. We could be normal.”

“My father always said normal was overrated” Richard murmurs, sleepy and a little grumpy from being kept from sleep. “Jules is fine. That doctor said those gummies would work. Another year.”

He falls asleep, but the next morning, after Jules goes to school, they fight about it, and then Richard goes to work, and Amsha runs the numbers again, reads about absorption disorders and malnutrition and thinks about her son and the unfairness of life.

Then, Richard comes home and tells her he’s been made redundant. 

He gets a severance package, a good one, and with money comes a change of heart. He picks Jules up and puts him on his shoulders, lets his son pull at his hair, horsing around. When he comes in after putting Jules to bed, he asks to see her plan.

* * *

She’s firm when communicating with the clinic. Just the cure. The same treatment he’d get if he was one point worse on the diagnostic scale. Bring her son up to normal, and leave it at that. No resequencing, no hybridisation, no ‘optional extras’. No upselling.

“No leather seats, my wife means” Richard says, pleased with himself, but he squeezes her hand and backs her up all the way through the testing process, finds her proper coffee and rubs her shoulders at night where they ache with the tension. He is perfect, she feels so safe and secure, and so it hurts all the more when it turns out it’s Richard who goes behind her back and gets Jules sequenced. 

The guides said that one of the ways to keep control over the clinics is to not consent to full sequencing. That there are ways to get sequencing done in the federation, but it’s known that sometimes they try to upsell by showing fake sequencing results. If you’re going to do it, get the sequencing done at home (guides available), and then take it to Adigion Prime with you. 

She’d told Richard. He’d agreed. They didn’t want a Khan for a son. They just want him to have a chance to be normal.

She doesn’t know until the day before the surgery. 

The doctor lays it out. There’s a problem with Jules’ connective tissue. A genetic problem. The way he is, he’ll struggle to heal from the surgery, he’ll struggle to respond to many types of medications. It’ll reduce his life span, affect his sight. They lay down the law; they won’t authorise him for surgery unless they agree to resequencing first. It’s too dangerous. The condition affects nineteen genes, which is a small number, so it won’t be huge. He’ll still be Jules, but this takes it from the borderline to the outright illegal, but what choice is there? 

She cross checks the genes they’ve highlighted against the ones the city doctor had flagged. There was no overlap. It was plausible, all so plausible, even as her internal alarms scream at her that she was warned about this. That she should walk away, take her little boy and go home and forget about this, give it another year. And yet, they’d come so far, they’d spent the money, they’d sacrificed everything. There was unlikely to be another chance to do this. Richard and the Doctor were quiet as she processed everything, flicked her special pen, her Jules pen, across her knuckles.

She signs the paperwork, and then signs the other paperwork, the one that says she knows the legal risks, knows that her son’s DNA won’t match official records anymore. Signs the declaration that she does this knowing the Federation’s ban on genetic manipulation of humans. That it is her choice to do this, and all consequences lie on their shoulders.

It's important, of course, the doctor says casually, after she’s signed the documents consenting to the correction of his genetic flaws, that Jules be successful. There are thousands of augmented humans living in the Federation, and they’re more likely to evade detection if they’re useful members of society. 

Amsha looks through the window at her son playing in the waiting room. He’s holding his bear absently by the hand, and stacking blocks with the other. The blocks are neat and tidy, something he’s never managed before. There’s a pang in her heart. Maybe the doctors back home are right, there’s a chance he’ll grow out of it, maybe he’ll be fine as an adult. He won’t be a doctor, but that’s fine. Neither of them are doctors. They’re just normal citizens, making a normal life, living in a paradise so glorious that her ancestors would have wept to see it for even a day. 

The doctor produces another sheet of paper and talks to her husband. They’re talking about IQ, about reflexes, about senses. Richard says something about how his son should be tall. 

“I’ll be right back” Amsha says, heart breaking, and goes to hug her son for the last time.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones, because the working title Sympathy for Amsha Bashir was probably too on the nose, even if it was accurate.
> 
> There have been a lot of stories about the circumstances of Julian’s augmentation, and they're all great, but I wanted to explore what it must be like to have a disabled child in a world that can do something for him, but chooses not to, and how you get from law abiding Federation citizen to genetic criminal. Naturally this also went into a feminist place, because my feminism is always centred on women and our place in society, especially the place of mothers and the politics of motherhood, and naturally it also went to an economics place, because Star Trek made me an economist and DS9 actually showed us how it worked (kinda). Human nature! Feminism! Economics! 
> 
> This is my second piece for my WIP Amnesty 2020, where I finish off all the fics in my WIP folder to stop me going mad in my PhD write up period as a kind of Coronavirus Decameron. Will they all be this dark? Who the hell knows. Come to [my tumblr](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com) and lets chat about it.


End file.
